(Voice of Paul) – Sweden’s 21-month stay in NATO waiting room came to an end this week with the long-awaited ratification of its May 2022 membership application by the Hungarian parliament.
Stockholm’s accession completes NATO’s expansion to 32 members, a growth prompted by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and met with repeated threats from President Vladimir Putin and his top officials.
Membership for Sweden and neighboring Finland—which joined in April 2023—has transformed NATO’s security environment in northern Europe and the Arctic, adding 830 miles of frontier with Russia and drawing a NATO noose around the Baltic Sea, already referred to by some officials as a “NATO lake.”
Through decades of official foreign policy neutrality—though with close NATO cooperation and European Union membership—Stockholm and Helsinki have long been preparing for Russian aggression. Now, with their abandonment of non-alignment, NATO is gaining two militaries that while relative minnows, are designed specifically to frustrate and bleed Russia. Finland is already spending more than 2 percent of its GDP on the military, Sweden’s Defense Ministry has told Newsweek it will do so by the end of 2024.
NATO expects 18 of its members to reach the threshold by the end of 2024. The U.S. is among the leaders spending 3.4 percent of its GDP, with Poland spending more than any other ally at 3.9 percent.
Among the lowest-spending nations are Luxembourg (0.72 percent), Spain (1.26 percent), and Belgium (1.26 percent).
Neil Melvin—the director of international security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank in London—told Newsweek: “Sweden notably brings to NATO a well-equipped army, over a hundred advanced [jet] fighters, a modern navy including five submarines, as well as a technologically advanced defense industrial base.